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In the spirit of Radar’s spring issue, The Place of Sustainability, we feature some of the recent travels of the SustainAbility team. They bring us a first-hand view of Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Brazil, Indonesia and India and a snapshot of some of the issues that currently define these diverse countries.

Bhutan, Denise Delaney
The Kingdom of Bhutan – or the Land of the Thunder Dragon – is sandwiched between China and Nepal with a population of three-quarters of a million people. Bhutan intrigues. There are no traffic lights. There is effectively no advertising. You will not find the outlet of a single, large multi-national company. The pursuit of happiness is the country’s greatest export.

Gross National Happiness (GNH) measures and supports Bhutanese society across nine domains, and builds on its original four pillars of happiness: sustainable and equitable socio-economic development, environmental conservation, the preservation and promotion of culture, and good governance. Whether or not GNH will prove an effective alternative to GDP or other measures, what one of the GNH co-authors, Karma Ura, says of GNH resonated quite strongly with me: …

Sarah Murray, a regular contributor to the Financial Times and The Economist Group, has been writing about sustainability since the late 1990s when few reporters were covering environmental and social issues in the business press. She talks to Frances Buckingham on how coverage of the issues has changed, the role of media in calling out corporate malpractice and showcasing solutions, and the need for companies to tell the whole story.

Frances Buckingham: How would you sum up your experience of covering sustainability issues for the Financial Times and The Economist Group?

Sarah Murray: Over the past decade of writing for the Financial Times (FT), what started as a niche topic has become much more mainstream. Early on, the paper recognised that social and environmental challenges present risks and opportunities, and that business readers generally want to hear about solutions, not problems. The FT now has regular special reports covering sustainability topics. And while the paper has an environment correspondent, other industry reporters also cover the social and environmental issues that affect the companies that fall within their beat. In that sense, sustainability has moved out of a silo to appear in a range of sections of the newspaper. The number of white papers and research reports I write for the Economist Intelligence Unit has also increased. And while in these reports, I once covered corporate sustainability as a single issue, I’ve recently been writing on more focused topics such as energy efficient buildings or green cities. …

The financial crisis has dominated headlines for several years. Now the talk has switched to recovery, which has led us to the question what type of recovery? There is an urgent need to reshape the global economic system—including financial markets—to better serve the needs of society, the environment and the wider economy. While we welcome signs of improved financial investment, rising incomes and profitability, we must also ensure that they are not at the expense of more sustainable development.

In this third edition of Radar, we explore the issue of sustainable finance and ask what chance is there for change? In our lead article we outline the business case for banks to be the institutions that steer us into a new era of sustainable finance (Banking on Sustainability: Financing the Future). Rob Cameron interviews Leo Johnson about his new book and the signs he sees of a new form of capitalism emerging (The Unusual Suspects: Leo Johnson). …

At the end of 2013, we asked a select group of clients and experts from our network what they thought would be on the horizon for sustainability in 2014. We published over 20 responses in the most recent edition of Radar and from time to time, we’ll highlight those responses on our blog.

“I see the emergence of a new approach to sustainable marketing, an approach that is in tune with how consumers shop: moving away from the ineffective approach of just giving consumers information to constructing a shopping environment that will help consumers notice, remember, see and ultimately buy sustainable brands.”
— Daniel Vennard, Global Sustainability Director for Brands, Mars Inc.

Collaboration for sustainability: Nike is working with its competitors to develop a systems change programme to eliminate hazardous chemicals from supply chains.

As the Guardian’s Jo Confino wrote at the close of the Rio+20 Conference in June 2012, “the most often used phrases in the many meetings I attended [were] the need to create ‘coalitions of the willing’ and a recognition that ‘all issues are inter-connected’ and cannot be viewed in silos.”

Collaboration is widely acknowledged as vital if we are to address global challenges at the scale and speed we need, but the current rhetoric often fails to acknowledge how hard it is to …

Sustainable Brands finally came to London, in November, a long way from its most recent home in balmy San Diego. The organisers may not have brought us sunshine but the event did bring a strong call for more humanity, heart, purpose, bravery and honesty in brands and business….

Two decades ago, business and NGOs sat poles apart, wary of each other’s intent and aims. Twenty years on — and with the realization of the need for collective action on environmental and social issues that play out across geographical, political, market and ecosystem boundaries — we see a shifting landscape. But has this move towards a focus on partnerships and collaboration overshadowed …

SustainAbility’s Frances Buckingham sits down with Paul Gilding – an independent writer and advocate on climate change, and former CEO of Greenpeace International and other NGOs – to discuss his new book and his optimism for humanity’s ability to successfully navigate, and be better off on the other side of, the Great Disruption….

For over two decades SustainAbility has been working on the evolving relationships between business and civil society – and in particular between business and NGOs. In 2003 we published The 21st Century NGO: In the Market for Change which explored questions around the relationships between NGOs AND businesses as well as questions around the operation of NGOs AS businesses. The report acknowledged that the organizations covered in the research were predominantly northern-based. In part this is because we believed that such models help describe how other parts of the world may develop. At the same time we realized that NGOs operating in emerging markets face very different opportunities and constraints….

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